Mobile phones are steadily becoming the only phone in American households, …

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Traditional telephone landlines in the US are slowly going the way of the rotary dial. According to a new survey from the National Institutes of Health, the majority of US residents still have both a home and mobile phone, but many are increasingly snipping the wires on their traditional home phone service in favor of a wireless phone.

Conducted by the CDC between July and December of 2007, the NIH survey includes responses from 24,514 adults aged 18 or older, and 9,122 children under the age of 18, from 13,083 households. In the context of the survey, a "wireless family" is defined by anyone in a family owning a working mobile phone. More than one family can live in a household, however, accounting for situations where multiple single-person families (individuals) or unrelated roommates live together.

To summarize, almost one in six households (15.8 percent) are wireless-only, meaning that at least one family in the household owns a wireless phone but there is no landline telephone. About 14.5 percent of adults (or 32 million Americans, by the survey's numbers) live in wireless-only households, while 14.4 percent of children (10 million) do.

Wireless-only households are on the rise. During the same July-December period of 2006, less than one in eight adults (11.6 percent) lived in wireless-only households. Two years before that, only one in eighteen adults (5.4 percent) lived the wireless lifestyle.

A number of demographic statistics shed light on exactly who is leaving traditional landlines behind. The largest percentage (56.9) are adults living with unrelated roommates, though adults renting their home (30.9 percent) were far more likely than adults who own their home (7.3 percent) to go entirely wireless. Age is another factor in landline abandonment, as 18-24 and 25-29 year-olds were far more likely to go wireless (31 and 34.5 percent, respectively) than adults aged 30-44 (15.5 percent), 45-64 (8 percent), and 65 or older (2.2). Adults living in poverty (27.4 percent) were more likely to live in a household with wireless telephones than those with higher income.

Even among households that had both landlines and mobile phones, 22.3 percent received "all or almost all" calls on mobile phones. So-called "wireless-mostly" account for 13.1 percent of all households.

This increasing trend towards owning nothing but wireless phones, or at least abandoning the use of landlines for most communication, has some major implications for the industry. As telecoms across the US slowly bow to consumer demand for "naked DSL," more consumers can drop their landlines in favor of their wireless phone. The move away from landlines is going to make life a bit more difficult for telemarketers already harried by the national Do Not Call Registry, as there's no centralized directory listing for cell phone numbers.